


Boton's Sherlock Metas

by Boton



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Author Commentary, Backstory, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 07:04:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2803811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boton/pseuds/Boton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fan fiction gives me the opportunity as an author to discuss my own analysis and head canon that goes into my works.  This will be an on-going document that I add to as I write my fiction; it's not necessary to read this to understand my work or to read my fiction to understand these metas.  Expect this to get academic, silly, pedantic, humorous, and whatever else may cross my mind while I write.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: All characters referred to in these works are the property of their creators/owners as established under applicable copyright law. Discussion herein is academic and analytical in nature. I am not profiting off these works.

**Tl;dr: Writing fan fiction is fun. Explaining your fan fiction via metas is also fun.**

**Written: Dec. 2014, post season 3**

Fan fiction is an interesting thing. 

As a writer, I have always believed that your writing should stand alone. The reader should be able to engage with your topic without explanation or elaboration outside the work, or you haven’t really done your job.

Fan fiction, however, is somewhat different. First, it assumes that the entire audience has viewed the “source material” – the book or TV show or movie or manga that the fiction references. That makes sense; writing for a particular audience is true of all types of writing, not just fan fiction. In the case of my Sherlock fan fiction, I have to assume that my readers have viewed Sherlock at least casually, and, in the case of missing scene stores, sometimes in quite a lot of detail.

But second, fan fiction invites a discussion. Fan fiction is often based not only on what we objectively view in our source material, but on what that experience says to us both as a viewer and as a reader or writer. Since that’s different for every person, passionate disputes can occur about the assumptions that a particular writer brings into his or her work that may not be to the liking or analysis of the reader. And the writer is invited to explain his or her “head canon” that was used in creating the piece under consideration. 

That’s kind of cool, really.

I’m taking advantage of this latitude to explain some of my own assumptions and analysis that go into my fan fiction in these meta. This will be a continuing work, updated as my writing progresses and my source material gives me, well, more source material. (In the case of Sherlock, it can’t come soon enough!)

Note to the reader: Throughout these meta, I will refer to the protagonists of Sherlock as “Sherlock” and “John,” while the protagonists of the Arthur Conan Doyle works will be “Holmes” and “Watson.”


	2. Sherlock, Drugs, and the Problems of Casual Use

**Tl;dr: Sherlock has used and probably still does use drugs from time to time. I believe he’s more or less in control of it, and that’s how I write my fiction.**

**Written: Dec. 2014, post season 3**

Nothing like plunging in with a contentious topic on the front end, eh?

First of all, disclaimer time. And I mean this. Nothing I say or write should in any way be taken to promote the irresponsible use of legal medications or the use at all of illegal drugs. There are dangers inherent in every drug – including societal risks that come from legal status of the substance – that are not worth the risk of taking lightly. 

OK, are we all cool with that? Now, on to the fun. Is Sherlock a user of illegal drugs, and how does that impact our perception of our protagonist?

The creators of Sherlock – or, indeed, any Sherlock Holmes interpretation set in modern day – had a bit of a challenge on their hands when it comes to the issue of drug use. Of course, every reader of Arthur Conan Doyle’s works is familiar with the vignette that greets us at the beginning of The Sign of the Four:

“Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction…Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it.”

Watson then lets us know that Holmes has two drugs of choice, morphine and cocaine, and he recounts Holmes’s famous justification. “My mind rebels at stagnation,” he says, going on to explain that if he had a puzzle to solve, he would not need the drugs, and, in fact, this is why he went into business for himself, becoming the world’s only “consulting detective.”

The passion for work is easy to import into Sherlock, but the drugs are problematic. That’s because, to the Victorian eye, there was nothing unusual about having a stock of morphine and cocaine in one’s own home. They were everyday, common medications that were used almost as panaceas. Look at vintage advertising labels from that period. Whether the problem was your husband’s cough, your baby’s colic, or your own “female troubles,” they could be solved by a visit to the local chemist (or the local snake-oil salesman) for a potion that may well contain one or more of cocaine, morphine, cannabis, opium, or alcohol. And, even though the relative strength of the drugs may have differed from modern “street drugs,” we can be certain that people in the Victorian era well understood the pleasure that could come from taking these substances.

Disapproval, then, was not based on legality but on a sense of temperance and some concern for deleterious effects. In the original Conan Doyle, Watson urges Holmes to cut back on the drugs not because they are illegal, immoral, or addictive, but because they might be doing harm to his body while they stimulate his mind. And, even though Victorians would have understood the idea of physical and psychological dependence (which we often somewhat erroneously shorthand as “addiction”), it would not have been black and white issue for them. Whereas modern society might recoil with horror at the idea that someone has used morphine even once recreationally (that is, for pleasure rather than for pain relief under a prescription), the Victorians would have assumed that such substances would be used from time to time for a variety of complaints (including psychological ones), and that it was only habitual or excessive use that was the problem. What Holmes is doing, then, would have been perceived by the Victorian audience somewhat as the equivalent of chugging cold medication three times a day when he’s bored – a little irresponsible, a bit socially unacceptable, probably not a great health move, but not necessarily representative of the lifelong label of “addict.”

So what does this mean for Sherlock? Well, it means that the writers have to tread lightly in their quest to recreate the Victorian experience of the stories without reintroducing Victorian norms about drugs. But they can’t completely ignore it, either; drug use is in the Holmesian DNA, and it must be dealt with.

In A Study in Pink, we get perhaps the clearest view of Sherlock’s past and potential present with drugs that we will get until His Last Vow (which I will tackle in a separate meta). At first, the writers play with the viewers who know the Conan Doyle background. Sherlock lies back on the sofa, eyes closed, his hand to his arm as he clearly feels something enter into his veins. A rush of pleasure runs over his face. It is the posture of a man who has plausibly just injected drugs, but in fact, he has just experienced an influx of nicotine from the three patches he has placed on his skin to heighten his perception. Nicotine as the modern alternative to cocaine? Maybe not.

Later, we see a less abstemious Sherlock. Sherlock returns to 221B to find Lestrade conducting a drugs bust, something that Sherlock is clearly familiar with. He doesn’t completely panic (although he is clearly agitated), he doesn’t want to know why on Earth Lestrade would be doing such a thing, but he does very much want John to shut up. John, who just met Sherlock, is in the place of the viewer, assuming that our hero, who we have not yet even seen light up a cigarette, wouldn’t dare try drugs. Sherlock, however, engages in a little eyebrow semaphore with John until John understands that Lestrade may have picked the wrong moment, but he doesn’t have the wrong guy. Lestrade is not wrong in thinking that he could conceivably catch Sherlock with illegal substances. He’s probably done so before. We don’t know if Lestrade would find anything if he hunted deeply enough, but one suspects that any failure of discovery lies more with Sherlock’s power to find a good hiding place than it does from any true innocence on his part.

**What About Danger Nights?**  
Sherlock’s potential drug use remains silent until A Scandal in Belgravia. Believing Irene Adler to be dead, Sherlock obviously starts to grieve, causing Mycroft to order John to stay with him and the pair to speculate on whether this might be a “danger night.” So what does this tell us?

First of all, I think it tells us that Sherlock is human – perhaps more so than he might wish to be. It would be normal for any person to want to numb the pain of loss as completely as possible. Another character might take solace in a bottle of scotch and drink themselves into a stupor. Even Mycroft could bend to a bit of chemical intervention by offering Sherlock a cigarette in the hallway outside the morgue, indicating that he has a zero-tolerance policy against the use of nearly any substance by Sherlock, but that he is willing to admit this as a special case.

Second, it indicates that Sherlock could readily take drugs if he really wants to. The purpose of having John stick by Sherlock is not just comfort; it is to stand guard against Sherlock actively using drugs. Sherlock likely has a stash of drugs somewhere that he perhaps hasn’t touched in a long time but which he keeps in case of crushing need. This could well be one of those circumstances, although we never get a definitive answer on screen.

This view is supported by the impromptu “drugs bust” that Mrs. Hudson and John conduct on the flat before Mycroft’s return. They tell Mycroft that they have checked all the “usual places” and come up empty, a compelling bit of dialog. From this one statement, we can infer that Sherlock regularly keeps drugs in the flat and that they are more or less an open secret – both John and Mrs. Hudson know where they are, so they are none too concerned about confiscating them at every turn. Perhaps he also has stashes that they don’t know about; we have no evidence either way.

Finally, this little scene implies that John has not witnessed a serious bender from Sherlock. Had John ever seen Sherlock get blotto on drugs, he would have his own frame of reference for determining if the Irene situation rose to the level of “danger night.” The fact that Mycroft is the arbiter of this would indicate that Sherlock has not had a serious episode in front of John, and that Mycroft is perhaps the last person to have witnessed a total loss of control. 

**Sherlock’s Drug Use**  
So what does my head canon say about Sherlock’s drug use, pre-His Last Vow? I think that the Sherlock that we observe fits the definition of a “recreational user.” He exercises enough intellectual control over his habit to flirt with but never quite reach the point of physical dependence. He plans out his use, exercising control over it to better the odds. 

In my story “All for a Case,” I suggest that Sherlock obtains his illegal substances and then brings them home to test for purity and strength; I also suggest that this allows him time to gather supplies to ensure clean injection. All of this I believe because of Sherlock’s intellect and because of what we have seen of his desire to control his own actions. Of course, this is a risky game, but Sherlock has never been adverse to risk; he just wants to stack the odds in his favor. And I think, during his “good” times, he takes pains to supply himself with reasonably safe, known substances and equipment so to minimize the potential risk.

Do I believe he thinks laws against certain drugs are pointless and, regardless, shouldn’t really apply to him? Yes.

Do I believe he’s ever miscalculated and woken up on the bathroom floor one morning with no memory of the night before? Yes. 

Do I think there are days during our current viewing timeline when he’s been so bored or in so much emotional pain that he counted down the hours until he could be alone long enough to do something to alleviate the torture in his own mind? Absolutely.

But do I think Sherlock is battling a drug addiction? No. I think he’s battling a brain chemistry that, on its best days, makes him legendary and nearly unstoppable, and that, on its worst days, makes his own mind a prison. And I think he puts the full power of his intellect behind a solution that includes walking a very treacherous line between occasional use and full dependence. And a lot of this comes to a head in His Last Vow.


	3. Sherlock, Drugs, and His Last Vow

**Tl;dr: Yes, Sherlock was using drugs. He was probably enjoying himself, too. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a junkie.**

**Written: Dec. 2014, post season 3**

All of what I speculated in Chapter 2 comes to a head in His Last Vow, in which Sherlock is clearly not just doing drugs, but doing them in a crack den. I believe that his appearance in the run down drug house is indeed “for a case;” I believe that he thought he needed to show Magnussen a vulnerability that could be uncovered and exploited. But the episode does raise some questions that I answer for myself in ways that inform my fiction.

 **Morphine or Cocaine?**  
This is the canon question that Watson asked Holmes in “The Sign of the Four” to determine whether the detective is doing depressants or stimulants that particular day. The same question may be asked of Sherlock.

While drug houses of the type shown are typically called “crack dens” (although John does refer instead to there being “a lot of smackheads inside,” arguing against a purely-cocaine crowd), I believe Sherlock is doing some sort of depressant, most likely heroin cut with some other substance. I believe this for two reasons.

First, I believe that Sherlock would not relish the boredom or the atmosphere of a drug den. In the first season, he mentions that he “disinfects” after interacting with his homeless network. This is not a man who would take lightly to sharing a dirty mattress with the same sort of person. He would need something to calm himself in order to be able to spend a boring night waiting to be discovered by the press. He doesn’t want to be manic and hyper-aware; he wants to be numbed to the environment and to his own thoughts.

Second, however, is Magnussen’s own file on Sherlock. We first see this file scroll in front of Magnussen’s eyes after Sherlock’s drug use has been exposed. One of the “pressure points” is opium. I tend to think this is a bit of a mistake; my understanding (not based on experience of any kind) is that opium would be difficult to obtain in the modern era, and we’ve seen no evidence that Sherlock has developed a poppy-growing hobby. Notice that there is no mention of cocaine as a pressure point.

If the intended pressure point is, instead, “opiates” or “opioids,” then things start to make sense. Magnussen would then have knowledge of Sherlock using anything from heroin to Vicodin to oxycodone. Many of these are readily available with a prescription and are societally accepted if used within certain constraints, just like morphine and cocaine were in Conan Doyle’s day. If we conjecture that the drug den scene in HLV represents a one-off return to heroin for theatrical effect, we could well believe that Sherlock keeps a stash of prescription pain killers and anti-anxiety medications in reserve for the days when his mind needs quieting. 

For my fiction, I choose to believe that Sherlock gave up cocaine sometime in his young adulthood as a risk not worth taking. Instead, I believe that Sherlock’s drug habit is now confined to opiates and opioids as substances that are relatively easy to obtain, even legally. Of course, in the drug den, Sherlock would need to do something injectable because he would have to be seen taking drugs; pills just aren’t dramatic enough to make an impression, and there’s no reason for him to go to a drug den to take them, so the ruse isn’t plausible. Even if he brings his own supply to the drug den, heroin would allow him to stage a bigger, more memorable production for the junkies to potentially report to the press. So, he injects heroin – and I firmly hope and believe that it’s from his own tested supply using his own sterile syringe.

Of course, all that planning doesn’t mean I think Sherlock is immune to the high. In fact, I think he enjoys it quite a bit. If he lives in hope that he will one day land a case that requires his dancing ability as an excuse to express himself that way, he almost certainly is thrilled when a case seems to require him to practice his favorite vice. I’m sure he enjoys it, but I contend that he keeps careful tabs on himself to not let things get out of hand.

 **Why Believe in Limits on Use?**  
A valid question, then, is why I believe Sherlock is limiting his drug use in any way. Certainly, the episode gives us very little indication of this. The exception might be that, in contrast to the drugs bust in A Study in Pink, Sherlock is irritated but not agitated by Mycroft searching the flat. He sulks in his chair while Anderson and company continue their search, instead of pacing nervously like he did during Lestrade’s bust. Not until Mycroft nearly finds Janine in Sherlock’s bedroom does he try to limit the search. Perhaps Sherlock no longer has a secret stash, or what he has is easily excusable (like prescription medications). 

An additional clue in this regard comes nearly an hour into the episode, during the “domestic” in 221B, the “addicted to a certain lifestyle” scene. Sherlock openly asks Mrs. Hudson for morphine “from [her] kitchen” because he’s run out. He’s in sufficient pain that, had he had a ready supply of morphine or opiate/opioid pain killers, he likely would have gone directly to his own stash. Whatever he usually has on hand, he has either already run through it during the lead-up to Leinster Garden (indicating that there wasn’t that much to begin), or he has run out and not quickly replaced it.

I believe that Sherlock is walking a mostly-successful line that lets him avoid a true drug problem. And this is because I don’t want this character overshadowed by an addiction. I want Sherlock to be the story of an incredibly intelligent yet wholly human man and the choices he makes in his life. And for the interest to remain, he can’t become consumed by just one vice. He has to maintain the ability to choose even a destructive act like taking drugs; the compulsion cannot have proceeded to the point where it is making the choice for him.

I don’t have any problems with a drug-addicted protagonist. After all, it was Gregory House and his multiple stashes of Vicodin that indirectly led me to discover Sherlock. But I think Sherlock is much more interesting when he is a study in choices. He tries to achieve a Mycroft-like standard of aloofness and objectivity, but he is too human, whether he believes it or not. 

I believe he responds like any normal human being to the pleasure that one can feel from substance use, but he makes the choices he needs to make to keep himself from hurtling over the edge. He believes that women might distract him overmuch from The Work, but he is powerfully drawn to The Woman, and I believe he is thoroughly enjoying his “connection” with Janine. I want my Sherlock to get to make choices in his life, and that doesn’t happen as easily if he is in an all-or-nothing battle with drugs.

 **Addicted to a Certain Lifestyle**  
So what do we do with His Last Vow? Even Sherlock seems to admit to an ongoing drug problem during the “addicted to a certain lifestyle” scene:

“You were a doctor who went to war. You’re a man who couldn’t stay in the suburbs for more than a month without storming a crack den, beating up a junkie. Your best friend is a sociopath who solves crimes as an alternative to getting high. That’s me by the way; hello. Even the landlady used to run a drug cartel.”

Sherlock is clearly identifying as a sociopathic drug user who only stays clean because of the distraction from his Work. But is that really what he intends here?

Looking at the scene in context, we see that Sherlock is presenting everything to John in an upside-down fashion to get him to reaccept Mary. John has just learned that Mary was the one who shot Sherlock during her quest to eliminate Magnussen as a threat. In the Leinster Garden confession, then, John’s perception of Mary has shifted from “wife” to “potential murderer.”

Sherlock needs John to flip those perceptions around, so he draws a parallel between Mary and the better-known quantities of John, Sherlock, and Mrs. Hudson. Viewed through their worst behavior, John is a violent danger junkie, Sherlock is an addict, Mrs. Hudson is a drug runner, and Mary has attempted murder. 

But Sherlock needs John to reconcile with Mary, and he urges this by drawing on the good will that John has for him and for Mrs. Hudson, and on the perception that John has of himself. After all, John knows his own motivations for going to war (which may not have been exclusively altruistic but almost certainly weren’t entirely for the adrenaline buzz). He knows that he didn’t storm a crack den and beat up a junkie; rather, he rescued a neighbor’s son from a crack den, requiring him to neutralize but not permanently harm Billy Wiggins. He knows that Mrs. Hudson is their kindly landlady who complains good-naturedly while bringing Sherlock and John tea and biscuits.

And John knows, better than anyone, that Sherlock is not a psychiatric case with a raging drug problem. He knows that the truth is the reverse: Sherlock is a man who solves crimes, and who has resorted to less admirable behavior when he can’t follow his vocation. So, by extension, Mary is not exclusively a potential murderer, but still John’s love who happens to have a very dark side to her. And this strategy halfway succeeds, as Sherlock eventually gets John to realize that Mary is, if not still the wife he loves, at least a client that deserves Sherlock and John’s help. The rest of the transition will take time.

 **Interpretation**  
So, ultimately, I will never believe (based on what I’ve seen through season 3) that Sherlock has an out-of-control drug habit, nor will I write him in a way that suggests that he is or ever was just one bad trip away from life on the streets and an early death by overdose. Others may do so; there is room for debate.

But I choose to write Sherlock as an intelligent man who makes choices in his life, most good, some not. I write him as someone who has used his intellect to exert a control over normal human desires and responses that is extraordinary but still not absolute; he succumbs to temptation, tries again, and may ultimately decide to give in to some (such as may be the case with The Woman and, perhaps, Janine). My story “All for a Case” explores this as a missing scene in His Last Vow.


	4. The Timeline of His Last Vow

**Tl;dr: His Last Vow spans six months of time, and it’s possible to compress Sherlock’s first hospital admission to four days. The rest of his time in hospital is his own darn fault.**

**Written: Dec. 2014, post-season 3**

The final episode of the season/series is always one that generates lots of fan fiction. Look back in the archives, and you will find lots of stories conjecturing what would happen if Sherlock pulled the trigger at the end of The Great Game and how he might have survived and fled post-The Reichenbach Fall. But it seems that no episode to date has generated quite as much speculation as His Last Vow.

Part of this, of course, is accelerating popularity of Sherlock, but part of it is because of the maddeningly-complicated timeline that requires a bit of deductive reasoning on the part of the viewer to understand what happened and what has been left to the imagination. Here, I share how I’ve teased out that timeline.

**Known Dates and Bookends**  
We have two fixed bookend dates for the episode. According to the wedding invitation, John and Mary’s wedding was on May 18. (Some have speculated that this is a misprint, but moving the wedding date later only makes the discussion herein easier, so I’ll keep the May 18 date as the most difficult possible scenario to deal with.) 

On the other end, Mummy Holmes explains that the Holmes family is having a rare Christmas Day gathering because “Sherlock is home from hospital, and we are all very happy.” Other comments from that episode corroborate that the gathering is indeed held on December 25, so there is no reason to suspect that Mummy has held her party early. Her phrasing, “Sherlock is home from hospital,” indicates that his release from hospital or at least an event that Mummy would take as his return to health has happened relatively recently. Although we can conjecture that Sherlock and Mycroft could have hidden a certain amount of information from their parents and put the “celebration” off to a certain extent, it seems clear that Sherlock’s return to normalcy has been a recent event.

That gives us seven months to play with, but it is not without problems. How we parcel out the time between the wedding and Christmas depends on the clues given to us in dialog, and it has tremendous implications for the Sherlock and Mary relationship.

**The Shortest Point Between Two Surgeries**  
We have two problems with how we use the seven months between the wedding and Christmas: First, Mary’s initial shooting of Sherlock in Magnussen’s office has to be bad enough to hospitalize him, but not so bad that he can’t plausibly deduce that she was trying to leave him alive. Second, the events surrounding Leinster Gardens and the aftermath then have to eat up the remainder of the time until Christmas. Let’s take these one at a time.

John and Mary’s wedding occurs on May 18. If we give them a week-long honeymoon, they return on about May 25, conveniently seven months from Christmas. It would be logical to assume that they would visit Sherlock at least once upon their return. There are plenty of reasons to do so: as best man, he may have agreed to store any wedding gifts (although I suggest he “filtered” that promise in my story “The Hamster on the Wheel”), he may have needed to convey any materials or invoices left over from the ceremony and reception, or John and Mary may have simply wanted to see him, show some honeymoon pictures, and pick up anything John may have left at 221B. Depending on when this took place, we can round up and say that John and Mary last saw Sherlock around June 1.

This is important, because His Last Vow opens with John telling Kate Whitney that he hasn’t seen Sherlock Holmes in a long time, and Mary corrects him to say, “about a month.” So, the episode begins on or about July 1.

Most of the first half of His Last Vow occurs all on the same day, even though emotionally it always feels to me like a couple of weeks of activity. But it’s important to place these single-day events and the time leading up to the events in Leinster Gardens on a timeline. The reason is that we have to be assured that Sherlock Holmes is not an idiot.

Of course he isn’t. Even taking drugs and later doped up on morphine, Sherlock Holmes can think circles around most people. And Sherlock eventually deduces that Mary has made a “surgical” wound by shooting him in a way that would take him out of the picture while she dealt with Magnussen and escaped but which would give him the best possible chance of survival.

Other meta-writers with medical backgrounds have plowed this ground and done it much better than I could, so I will leave them to it. However, I will say that I believe that Mary must have been aiming for and actually shot Sherlock in the liver, with possible involvement of the inferior vena cava hastening hypovolemic shock. However, once that was repaired, Sherlock had to start to feel a bit better fairly rapidly, allowing him to develop the hypothesis that Mary did not intend to kill him. Since one can lose part of one’s healthy liver (through live donation, for example) and still be up and walking, albeit uncomfortably, within about a week, I think we have to assume that Sherlock has roughly that level of post-surgery experience. Otherwise, were he immobilized and in tremendous, unrelenting pain for the week between the shooting and Leinster Garden, he may well have concluded that Mary was trying to take him more permanently out of the equation.

Instead, if Sherlock feels some better after a bit less than a week than he did immediately post-op, he is free to test the theory that Mary is a good enough shot to hit him exactly where she intends. In fact, the less time that passes between the initial shooting and Sherlock’s escape to Leinster Gardens, the more plausible his theory about Mary becomes. I content that there were four, or at most five, days between the shooting and Leinster Gardens, according to this timeline:

**Thursday:** John finds Sherlock in the drug den, takes him into Bart’s for drug testing, and later accompanies him to Magnussen’s office for the proposal/break-in. Why Thursday? Sherlock’s entire plan hinges on Magnussen having a meeting with the “Marketing Council of Great Britain” from 7:00 until 10:00. Since Great Britain observes a Saturday/Sunday weekend, it is unlikely that what is probably a dinner meeting would occur on the day before the weekend begins (Friday). Therefore, the last possible day of the week that Magnussen could have that meeting is Thursday.

**Friday:** Sherlock is shot sometime in the mid-evening Thursday, and the first surgery occurs sometime that night. We might conjecture that he doesn’t really start regaining consciousness until Friday morning, because Mary stands in front of a window that is growing light during her “visit” to tell Sherlock not to tell John about who shot him. For consistency, I assume that’s an east-facing window.

Also on Thursday-into-Friday, Janine must learn or figure out that the proposal was a scam and decide to take revenge. Friday would be an excellent time to call Magnussen’s competitors and sell her story; she will have the entire weekend to sit for interviews and collect her pay. Also, if she has any desire to get away from Magnussen’s employ, this gives her the weekend to get her ducks in a row for that. Or her bees, more accurately. Janine must be a savvy real estate consumer, because she’s already gotten her eye on the Sussex Downs property before she goes to visit Sherlock in hospital.

**Sunday:** Janine’s story runs in the papers; if the editors are smart, they’ve saved their “SHAG-A-LOT HOLMES” stories for the Sunday papers if those are the biggest issues of the week. Janine collects copies of the papers in preparation for….

**Monday:** Janine visits Sherlock in hospital and lets him in on what she’s done. We see her dressed professionally, and she notes that she has an interview with The One Show. Since that show runs on weekdays, Monday is the earliest day she could be heading off for that interview. I conjecture that her visit and her “fiddl[ing] with the taps” of Sherlock’s morphine were sufficient to wake him out of a drug-induced stupor and get him thinking.

Sherlock spends the day either in his mind palace or on the internet, finding out what he can about Mary Morstan. By the time John and Lestrade visit that evening, he’s escaped. This could be Tuesday, but I think it’s more likely to be Monday, since both John and Lestrade would have had to work that day, and John mentions that Sherlock is “drugged up, so he’s pretty much babbling.” If John’s last visit were on Sunday prior to Janine’s Monday daytime visit, then he would have last seen Sherlock on a full dose of morphine rather than the minimal amount Janine dialed the PCA down to. He would certainly have been babbling, although John probably misunderstood any questions about Mary as being from a less-clear-headed place than they actually were. 

Additionally, even if Lestrade were granted a fair amount of leeway in interviewing Sherlock about who shot him, four days is probably the most he’s going to get away with waiting. John’s warnings to Lestrade about Sherlock’s condition indicate that Lestrade has not been showing up every day in hopes of getting a statement – this is probably his first visit. So Monday is looking good for the notion that Sherlock feels halfway decent (although fairly exhausted, as we see when he tries to think about Mary in his mind palace) and had developed a hypothesis that he now wants to go out and test.

When Sherlock finally collapses at 221B, the paramedics ask, “we were told there was a shooting?” Sherlock can truthfully reply, “there was: last week.” And Sherlock has left Leinster Gardens armed with the knowledge that he believes his initial injury to have been serious but not intended to be deadly, and he believes Mary to be enough of a crack shot to have tried such a stunt. He can’t help but admire that. 

Of course, Sherlock’s next actions set back his recovery by several months, but this time, it’s his own darn fault.

**That’s Why People Hire Movers**  
Only Sherlock knows what he was up to between leaving hospital and collapsing in 221B, but most of the available options are not good, and none of them include a lot of rest and recuperation, as he would have been asked to do had he been discharged from the hospital after a week or so. Based on the events of HLV, we know that Sherlock climbed out of the window, possibly walked back to 221B (or at least far enough to get a cab), possibly hauled John’s chair back to the sitting room from wherever he’d moved it in the first place, went to Leinster Gardens, arranged for projection for Mary’s picture, and met with Billy Wiggins to arrange his interception of Mary. While Billy may have helped Sherlock do some of this, it’s clear that Sherlock did far too much, and now he’s intensified his original injuries.

So, once again, Sherlock is off to hospital, this time recognizing an irregular heartbeat and symptoms of internal bleeding in himself soon enough to call his own ambulance. (What a bad-ass, our Sherlock.) Now his recovery is from two surgeries, two cardiac events (the initial “flat line” and the second round “need to restart [his] heart”), and probably two separate cases of internal bleeding and hypovolemic shock. There goes the rest of the autumn!

Our only remaining bit of timeline puzzle is the meeting with Magnussen. In the restaurant scene, Magnussen arrives wearing a suit but not an overcoat, and Sherlock is wearing only a hospital gown and is still heavily dependent on morphine. (He may have a dressing gown laid over the back of his chair, but he doesn’t have anything as heavy as the Belstaff.) The continued dependence on the drugs and the lightness of the clothing would indicate that Sherlock met Magnussen more or less as soon as he was once again ambulatory, so I tend to make this late summer in my personal timeline. He already has knowledge of how long it will take him to recover, because he makes plans for Christmas.

Taking all this into account, I have conjectured that Sherlock was discharged from hospital in early October (as I state in “Homecoming”). He was not yet able to live alone at 221B, so my preferred backstory is that he went to stay with Mycroft for a while, giving the relationship between the two brothers some time to somewhat thaw, allowing Sherlock to think about his brother alongside John, Mary, and Janine when he finally “emptied the Appledore vaults” on Magnussen’s patio on Christmas day.


	5. How Amber Volakis Solves the Mary Morstan Problem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one is going to be a bit contentious! Obviously, if you don't want to see Mary dead, then all the reasoning I can throw at you won't persuade you. I don't know if I *want* her to die, either. But if we're going to keep close to canon, the character needs to go. Here's an out.
> 
> Note: Because of some unsavory stuff going on in the fandom threatening the actors who play certain parts, let me say clearly and upfront: This meta is about how to give a CHARACTER an out that will advance the trajectory of the plot in a direction that feels respectful of ACD canon. It should be abundantly clear that this in no way is talking about real people or real events.

**Tl;dr: The way Amber Volakis’s death was handled on House gives us a potential model for how Mary Morstan might die on Sherlock.**

**Written September 2015, pre-season 4**

_Note: This meta will also appear on my Tumblr at 221Boton.tumblr.com._

The creators of any modern Sherlock Holmes adaptation have a problem, and her name is Mary Morstan.

In ACD canon, Mary was easy to handle. Watson fell in love with her straight away in the first canon story, “The Sign of Four,” when she was acting as a client. Then, like most good Victorian women, she more or less disappeared into the domestic sphere. When Watson moved back into 221B and Holmes offered his condolences, most fans filled in the blanks by assuming that Mary died in childbirth, taking the baby with her. It’s not a far-fetched assumption. According to one source, maternal mortality rates during the early 1800s were 20 percent, a figure unlikely to have been much lower for Mary Morstan at the end of the century, even with her husband being a doctor. Infant death was even more likely; one need only look at historical census rolls to see the tragedy of son after son named for his father only to die before childhood had even really begun.

Thankfully, this sort of tragedy is not realistically in play for Sherlock’s Mary Morstan, nor do we want it to be. But the sight of our Mary standing heavily pregnant on the tarmac at the end of S03Ep03 “His Last Vow” presents a problem.

Now, let’s stop for a minute and assume that Mary gives birth to a bouncing baby girl. Raise your hands if you think this changes nothing about the Holmes-Watson dynamic.

Yeah, me either. For those of you who aren’t sure, let me pose this problem: If John is a new father, do we really think that he’s going to want to be running all over London getting shot at with Sherlock? Do we think the audience is going to put up with a new father who runs all over London getting shot at with Sherlock? To the Victorians, child rearing was for the domestic sphere; today, we’d expect a father to at least be involved enough to try not to get killed.

Now, do we have a show if John stops running all over London getting shot at with Sherlock? Or do we have some ridiculous sitcom better titled “Three Sociopaths and a Baby?”

OK, intelligent minds differ. But for those of us who think the character Mary must die, and soon, Amber Volakis of House presents a pretty admirable way to do it and further the Holmes-Watson relationship.

[Spoilers ahead for S04Ep16 “Wilson’s Heart”]

In S04Ep16 “Wilson’s Heart,” we discover that Amber Volakis, Wilson’s love interest and the Mary Morstan character in this Holmes adaptation, has been severely injured in a bus crash she was in as a direct result of her responding to House’s drunk-dial for a pick-up from a bar. She was taking a prescription flu medication, amantadine, which, because of her severe kidney injuries in the bus crash, her body could not clear from her body. The result was an overdose that could not be cleared by dialysis, and Amber was handed a death sentence.

In a heart-rending sequence powerfully acted by Robert Sean Leonard and Anne Dudek, Wilson brings her out of chemical sedation long enough to tell her what has happened and to squeeze out a few more precious moments with her before Amber decides that it’s time to “go to sleep,” consoling Wilson that they were “always going to want just a little longer.” Wilson ends the episode standing in the doorway of House’s hospital room, unable to go in and be with his friend (who had risked both his life and his powerful brain to recover enough memories to find Amber) but unable to completely ignore House’s well-being. The season ends with an estranged rift between the two that, like a broken bone, ultimately heals stronger than it was before.

So here’s what Amber’s death did: It broke Wilson. And, in breaking Wilson, it gave him the freedom to grow in his relationship with House. Throughout the first four seasons, we knew perfectly well that House would never have any other friend but Wilson; no one else could be that perfect combination of compassionate and masochistic required to put up with House. But what did House bring to the relationship for Wilson?

After season four, there is a palpable change in the relationship. It’s subtle, but you can see House adapt to protect Wilson, to be the support that Wilson needs. And Wilson grows to depend on House. Sure, he has other romantic relationships after Amber, but they are always presented as a side issue. His real relationship is with House. 

As I write this, I don’t think season 4 of Sherlock has been written, and I don’t know what the creators intend for Mary. But, if they want to stick close to ACD canon and let her die an on- or off-screen death, they could use it much like House used Amber. Use it, oh Powers That Be, to break John Watson.

I can well-imagine a case Sherlock undertakes right before Mary gives birth: Mary, being ex-CIA and probably bored to tears by now, wanting one more thrill before the baby, begs to go along. Sherlock says it will be fine; John’s not so sure, but he’s outvoted. Things go pear-shaped, and suddenly John is a widower in the worst possible way.

Do something like that in the first episode of the season, then spend the three-episode arc having Sherlock help John heal. Make it an arc of anger and forgiveness and healing. Let it end with the two standing in 221B together, as they always should be, complete only with each other. Let them both be stronger broken and together than they ever were whole and alone.

Come on, Mr. Moffat and Mr. Gatiss. Make us cry. You’ve done it before; I know you can do it again!


	6. Watson as Boswell, or What Perspective Tells us About John’s Thoughts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The degree to which any Sherlock Holmes adaptation is limited to the perspective of John Watson tells us a lot about how to read it or view it. I discuss the particular perspective used in Sherlock and how that gives us permission to have a range of reactions.

**Tl;dr: Watson’s role as Boswell varies according to the particular Sherlock Holmes version you watch; our John succeeds in telling us that we can both love Sherlock and be frustrated by him at the same time.**

**Written August 2016, pre-season/series 4**

_Note: This meta will also appear on my Tumblr at 221Boton.tumblr.com._

In the ACD original stories, Holmes turns to Watson and says, “I’d be lost without my Boswell.” This endearing little line has made it’s way down to us in Sherlock form as “I’d be lost without my blogger.” Either way, the line is about more than a progressing friendship; it is also about how we, the readers/viewers, can use John Watson as a lens through which to view Sherlock Holmes.

The term “Boswell” refers to James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson. Wikipedia tells us that a “Boswell,” then, is “constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print.” But the degree to which Watson functions as a true Boswell tells us how much of the Sherlock Holmes narrative is Watson’s perspective, and how much belongs to another character or to our own interpretation.

Remember those deadly dull rules for point of view you learned in high school: first person, third person limited, third person omniscient, and all that rot? Well, let me propose a slightly different scheme made just for the Sherlock Holmes universe: Boswell complete, Boswell occasional, and Boswell permissive. I’ll show you what I mean:

Of course, the original ACD stories and the Granada television adaptations are **Boswell complete**. Because Watson’s stories for The Strand magazine were a fictional device to allow ACD to write stories for The Strand, we can assume that everything we read (or see) is Watson’s perspective. This is particularly important when it comes to the character of Sherlock Holmes, who Watson spares no effort in describing as amazing and intelligent and just a little bit frustratingly quirky. 

But the reality is, we don’t really know what Holmes is like; we know what Watson wants us to think Holmes is like. Maybe he’s being a faithful narrator; maybe he’s making Holmes more exciting - or more socially acceptable - than he really is. We’ll never know.

Other versions start to break this down. In the recent Russian Sherlock Holmes, JohnWatson (remember, I spell it as all one word because they pronounce it that way) sees Sherlock as he really is: a young, raw boffin who needs to be taught to box and is kind of naive when it comes to women like Irene Adler. His editor, however, wants a much more exciting Sherlock Holmes for his pages, and so the background story is how JohnWatson-as-Boswell makes a much more interesting Sherlock Holmes for the audience. I would call this **Boswell occasional** , because sometimes we see JohnWatson’s gloss on Sherlock, and sometimes we see the “real” thing. Sherlock’s John does this occasionally as well, although it is quite clear when he is blogging to increase Sherlock’s PR and when he is the long-suffering and sometimes-annoyed friend.

Where it gets interesting, I think, is with the perspective I call **Boswell permissive**. In this point of view, we tend to see Holmes as he more-or-less really is, but Watson gives us permission by his own presence to like Holmes regardless how prickly he really is.

One example of this is in House. House is clearly the most misanthropic, unpleasant character in all of Princeton-Planesboro Teaching Hospital. His only saving grace is that he doesn’t really want to interact with patients, because, seriously, would you want to deal with that kind of an attitude problem out of your doctor when you are ill?

On the other hand, Wilson is the kindest, nicest guy that ever practiced medicine. No wonder he went into oncology; he found the most high-touch, long-relationship specialty he could, and he excels at it. And, for some reason, this really nice guy loves House. Well, if Wilson can love House, maybe it’s OK for us as viewers to at least root for House to be right with his diagnoses and hope he doesn’t get kicked around too hard by life. If Wilson thinks it’s OK, who are we to argue?

**Reading John Watson**

So what does this tell us about our John? Well, because we are pretty sure that we are not seeing the film version of his blog, we know that we are seeing “real life” rather than John’s opinion exclusively. Instead, if John is operating in “Boswell permissive,” he is giving us permission to react to Sherlock. He tells us that Sherlock’s deductions are amazing, from the time of that very first cab ride; we’re allowed to be impressed, and we know that John is something special if he can see that talent without jealousy. After all, everyone else tells Sherlock to piss off, but John sees his life opened like a book and finds it amazing.

But John also tells us it is OK to be frustrated with Sherlock. When John referred to Sherlock’s “Asperger’s” during HoB, he was clearly communicating that we are right in thinking that Sherlock would be a terrible traveling companion. And we can share John’s frustration that neither Sherlock nor Mary saw fit to let John in on Mary’s past until the last possible moment in HLV, in spite of the fact that John was the most affected by the lies. 

This is all important as we head into season four, because we have now spent a good 90 cumulative minutes in Sherlock’s head, removing John’s perspective entirely. Nearly all of TAB, a good chunk of HLV, and a snippet of HoB were all mind palace scenes, which John could only observe from the outside. This makes this version of Sherlock Holmes unique in truly “getting inside Sherlock’s head,” but it also means that we can cherish our scenes with John a bit more, because we know that when he speaks about Sherlock, he’s telling us how he really feels and giving us guidance on what we might be able to think. Truly, without the Boswell - in any perspective - there would be no Sherlock Holmes.


End file.
